ABSTRACT
Southeast Asia by the middle of the nineteenth century had become an arena of imperial rivalry between Britain and France. There was growing interest in both countries in exploring the regions that abutted China because the fabled riches of the Middle Kingdom were believed to be a potential source of enormous commercial opportunity. Imperialists, colonialists, internationalists and nationalists, for almost two centuries, have shared a vision of economic and political union in Indochina. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, France brought together in l'Union Indochinoise the five distinct territories of Annam, Cambodia, Cochinchina, Tonkin and eastern Laos, areas that were not tightly integrated at the time and enjoyed no common political life or cultural heritage. Marxism-Leninism entered French Indochina in the inter-war period via Vietnam. The Indochinese Communist Party, founded in Hanoi in 1930, was the product of Soviet initiatives to form a communist party to combat French colonialism throughout the subregion.
